Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Back to the Suburban Grind: Hair raising
Back to the Suburban Grind: Hair raising: I cut my hair down to the quick because it was getting on my nerves. This week. A few weeks ago I cut it down to the skull because some ne...
Hair raising
I cut my hair down to the quick because it was getting on my nerves. This week. A few weeks ago I cut it down to the skull because some new product that promised to strengthen the short hair I did have on my head not only did not strengthen it but caused it to become brittle and dry. I sheared it off to start over. I'd been threatening this all summer, a massive cut, because I just could not find myself in the style that my slow-growing coif was presenting, and I wanted edgy, androgynous, strong and felt more like Dorothy Hamill mushroom or short-haired newscaster safety helmet.
I've given up on long hair. For me. When we lived in Barbados, my hair grew like a wacky weed due to the climate, moisture, water, and raging hormones I produced due to the recent arrival of my second babe. I wore it long and loose, top-knotted, with braids, shells, twists and left in the sand, conditioner, salt water (rinsing only the chlorine), and let the sun bleach it out. This was a me I never imaged. Super feminine, sexy, and girly. Only now can I admit that I was gorgeous--sun-kissed, toned, long-haired. I had headbands and rubber bands, barrettes and buns. I put flowers behind my ears and looked so demure and precious that I felt like a character. It was fun, truly. But when we got back to the States, all that hair threatened my time management and the style (mostly a bun or a ponytail) made me feel undefined and misdirected.
Since I was in seventh grade and a beauty school fuck-up destroyed my hair, my confidence, and my life in one afternoon's attempt at the ill-thought but insanely popular Jheri Curl, my hair has been short. I want to say that I took to it effortlessly, but that would be a flat out lie. I cried my face off for months as my pimply, awkward, pre-teen chubby face was forced to take center stage at just the moment that I wanted to wait in the wings. I wore a headband for years, afraid to let the hair just be, hopeful that it would grow long and full and I'd be able to poof it to heaven like all the other 80's vixens (black and white). It never dawned on me to wear a weave or a wig, they'd never have suited me, but I endured my wide open face on display with a tortured, simmering hurt.
My girls have hair down to their shoulders. The oldest has the most beautiful mane of auburn, blond, and chestnut hair that coils and twists and extends from her skull out into the world. When she wears it down, which is not often, she stuns. She has no idea of the power that head holds, and not just because of the hair. She struggles with the kinks and the knots and the fullness, but I have promised her that she will come to love it. She's a Leo and I've told her that she will walk the world like a lion one day and will love her unruly curls. For now, she wears it pulled back in a ponytail or bun. My youngest has dark brown hair with auburn highlights. Hers is wavier, thinner, and she loves it in side ponytails and topknots. Her cascading locks makes her look older than her six years. She's glamorous and girly and sweet. She often wonders aloud if I want longer hair, if I want to wear ponytails, or if I "like" my hair short "like a boy."
I do. Like it short like a boy. This is my familiar style. But it gives me no protection. There is nowhere to hide and nothing to make me beautiful on days that I am not. When my hair is short, super short like it is now, I have doubts and cannot slink under my bangs or wipe my hair back behind my ears. When it is short like this I have to hope that a wriggle of my nose or a twitching of the corners of my mouth or a flutter of my eyelashes doesn't give me away. With my hair short like this, anything and everything can be betrayed. It was once just my feelings but now it's my wrinkles, my changing hormones, my sprinkling of greys which seem to show up better when my hair is worn close to the skull.
As soon as my hair is cut, I begin the process of starting to grow it back. More as an exercise in its ability to still do that, grow, than in hoping I get locks flowing to my shoulders. The truth is that it just doesn't grow like that. There are people whose hair grows like weeds, a little water and light and the garden flourishes. Not mine. This is a black girl's story, and one that I will not tell with any fresher perspective than it has been previously told. My hair, because of the way it grows, because it is coarse and kinky, does not grown like silken threads, returning in months to pre-cut lengths. Mine can take years and breaks with frequency. The growing out sometimes leaves me frustrated and I run to the scissors. I can't wait. I have no judgment or loathing of myself because of this truth; I have resigned myself to it. The struggle is real.
The girls' hair, both some combination of my kinky, scrappy, nappy curls and my husband's fine, sweeping curls (of yesterday as he is now suffering from some level of hair loss that only occasionally strikes him as a horror) grows just fine. Mine has always needed coaxing. Oils and creams and potions. Wraps, conditioners, and special combs or brushes. It takes its time. And I wait. Until I can't.
Little girls with short pixie or asymmetricals, tight Afros or blunted bobs make me smile. The gender specific styles really influence the littles and anything that runs counter to that makes me beam. A friend has a daughter who brings her short cut, gold earrings, Star Wars, long shorts game every day and I call her my avatar. To bring it like that, as a baby boo, is so epic. The amount of judgment and projection that goes onto the shorn head of a woman or girl is pretty massive. Sometimes even I can't bear the weight. Yet she's all the way in and wondering what's wrong the folks who don't get her vibe, her style, not the other way around.
My crowning glory has to be my aura and not my hair. My halo is in the ether and not on my head. And though I sometimes have to shore myself up for each morning, each moment I pass the mirror, each time I reach to push my hair out of my face, and while I like my hair short, and have grown to love it over the past 30 years, I have never felt so seen and so naked. I imagine that people can see through my skin into my heart, can read behind my eyes, can see my thoughts, so I run my hand over my head...but it's still gone. I know it's not the hair. The hair doesn't really supply the power. It doesn't really protect or shield and it doesn't really make me more beautiful or more feminine. I don't even really look like a boy. But I have wanted to hide, to disappear, to go away, be invisible and unseen. I've seen my youth and my wide-eyed wonder recede under that skull cap of a style. I've seen my face loom larger, my eyes keener, my lines and wrinkles lightly tracing where I laughed and smiled and cried and picked. I've seen my face lurch forward with something I'd not realized was there before. Experience and wisdom.
I know things and I will not hide it. I can't. Because my hair is cut short to the quick and the truth is written all over my face.
(c) Copyright 2015. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Addendum: This is my journey with my hair. There is no judgment-stated or implied-for how others choose to wear their hair. It has been a lifelong process for me, dealing with this hair, and what the styles say to society at large, but I am at peace with it. Except for when I'm not.
I've given up on long hair. For me. When we lived in Barbados, my hair grew like a wacky weed due to the climate, moisture, water, and raging hormones I produced due to the recent arrival of my second babe. I wore it long and loose, top-knotted, with braids, shells, twists and left in the sand, conditioner, salt water (rinsing only the chlorine), and let the sun bleach it out. This was a me I never imaged. Super feminine, sexy, and girly. Only now can I admit that I was gorgeous--sun-kissed, toned, long-haired. I had headbands and rubber bands, barrettes and buns. I put flowers behind my ears and looked so demure and precious that I felt like a character. It was fun, truly. But when we got back to the States, all that hair threatened my time management and the style (mostly a bun or a ponytail) made me feel undefined and misdirected.
Since I was in seventh grade and a beauty school fuck-up destroyed my hair, my confidence, and my life in one afternoon's attempt at the ill-thought but insanely popular Jheri Curl, my hair has been short. I want to say that I took to it effortlessly, but that would be a flat out lie. I cried my face off for months as my pimply, awkward, pre-teen chubby face was forced to take center stage at just the moment that I wanted to wait in the wings. I wore a headband for years, afraid to let the hair just be, hopeful that it would grow long and full and I'd be able to poof it to heaven like all the other 80's vixens (black and white). It never dawned on me to wear a weave or a wig, they'd never have suited me, but I endured my wide open face on display with a tortured, simmering hurt.
My girls have hair down to their shoulders. The oldest has the most beautiful mane of auburn, blond, and chestnut hair that coils and twists and extends from her skull out into the world. When she wears it down, which is not often, she stuns. She has no idea of the power that head holds, and not just because of the hair. She struggles with the kinks and the knots and the fullness, but I have promised her that she will come to love it. She's a Leo and I've told her that she will walk the world like a lion one day and will love her unruly curls. For now, she wears it pulled back in a ponytail or bun. My youngest has dark brown hair with auburn highlights. Hers is wavier, thinner, and she loves it in side ponytails and topknots. Her cascading locks makes her look older than her six years. She's glamorous and girly and sweet. She often wonders aloud if I want longer hair, if I want to wear ponytails, or if I "like" my hair short "like a boy."
I do. Like it short like a boy. This is my familiar style. But it gives me no protection. There is nowhere to hide and nothing to make me beautiful on days that I am not. When my hair is short, super short like it is now, I have doubts and cannot slink under my bangs or wipe my hair back behind my ears. When it is short like this I have to hope that a wriggle of my nose or a twitching of the corners of my mouth or a flutter of my eyelashes doesn't give me away. With my hair short like this, anything and everything can be betrayed. It was once just my feelings but now it's my wrinkles, my changing hormones, my sprinkling of greys which seem to show up better when my hair is worn close to the skull.
As soon as my hair is cut, I begin the process of starting to grow it back. More as an exercise in its ability to still do that, grow, than in hoping I get locks flowing to my shoulders. The truth is that it just doesn't grow like that. There are people whose hair grows like weeds, a little water and light and the garden flourishes. Not mine. This is a black girl's story, and one that I will not tell with any fresher perspective than it has been previously told. My hair, because of the way it grows, because it is coarse and kinky, does not grown like silken threads, returning in months to pre-cut lengths. Mine can take years and breaks with frequency. The growing out sometimes leaves me frustrated and I run to the scissors. I can't wait. I have no judgment or loathing of myself because of this truth; I have resigned myself to it. The struggle is real.
The girls' hair, both some combination of my kinky, scrappy, nappy curls and my husband's fine, sweeping curls (of yesterday as he is now suffering from some level of hair loss that only occasionally strikes him as a horror) grows just fine. Mine has always needed coaxing. Oils and creams and potions. Wraps, conditioners, and special combs or brushes. It takes its time. And I wait. Until I can't.
Little girls with short pixie or asymmetricals, tight Afros or blunted bobs make me smile. The gender specific styles really influence the littles and anything that runs counter to that makes me beam. A friend has a daughter who brings her short cut, gold earrings, Star Wars, long shorts game every day and I call her my avatar. To bring it like that, as a baby boo, is so epic. The amount of judgment and projection that goes onto the shorn head of a woman or girl is pretty massive. Sometimes even I can't bear the weight. Yet she's all the way in and wondering what's wrong the folks who don't get her vibe, her style, not the other way around.
My crowning glory has to be my aura and not my hair. My halo is in the ether and not on my head. And though I sometimes have to shore myself up for each morning, each moment I pass the mirror, each time I reach to push my hair out of my face, and while I like my hair short, and have grown to love it over the past 30 years, I have never felt so seen and so naked. I imagine that people can see through my skin into my heart, can read behind my eyes, can see my thoughts, so I run my hand over my head...but it's still gone. I know it's not the hair. The hair doesn't really supply the power. It doesn't really protect or shield and it doesn't really make me more beautiful or more feminine. I don't even really look like a boy. But I have wanted to hide, to disappear, to go away, be invisible and unseen. I've seen my youth and my wide-eyed wonder recede under that skull cap of a style. I've seen my face loom larger, my eyes keener, my lines and wrinkles lightly tracing where I laughed and smiled and cried and picked. I've seen my face lurch forward with something I'd not realized was there before. Experience and wisdom.
I know things and I will not hide it. I can't. Because my hair is cut short to the quick and the truth is written all over my face.
(c) Copyright 2015. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Addendum: This is my journey with my hair. There is no judgment-stated or implied-for how others choose to wear their hair. It has been a lifelong process for me, dealing with this hair, and what the styles say to society at large, but I am at peace with it. Except for when I'm not.
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Back to the Suburban Grind: A Case of the 23's
Back to the Suburban Grind: A Case of the 23's: Our main babysitter is 23 years old. A gorgeous redhead with long legs and a nervous giggle, she's smart and kind and good and funny an...
Monday, September 28, 2015
A Case of the 23's
Our main babysitter is 23 years old. A gorgeous redhead with long legs and a nervous giggle, she's smart and kind and good and funny and so loved by the girls that they throw their arms around her whenever they see her anywhere. Even at St. James Gate where we went for a beer and a bite and they saw her saddled up to the bar on her laptop on a corner stool trying to people watch and hide from the crowds. I love her too. She feels so very familiar to me.
Recently, she has been cancelling our babysitting gigs at the last minute possible with lots of apologies and promises to do better and each time, rather than giving her the business. I gently explain to her how and why this is not acceptable, make other arrangements, and then check in on her a day or two later. I have talked her through break-ups, move outs, job searches, resume building, heartache, hospital stays, sending texts in the night when a thought comes into my mind. I want her to feel loved and cared for. She's 23. It's hard to know.
When I was 23, I found my poor soul at the end of one of the most important relationships of my life. While other bigger adults knew that this was par for the course, my imminent break up was consuming me, actually consuming me and I was achy and scrawny and scratchy and messy. I'd sent my belongings out to Colorado to move with him, where we'd live "as friends and roommates" because the shit was over and I had somehow agreed to that. I'd quit my job, the job procured with the help of one of my favorite people on earth, a college painting and drawing professor who really guided me in a way I'd not been in my life, and told everyone "So long, suckas!" And then backtracked. "What the f*** was I doing?" I had not thought this plan all the way through. I was going to MOVE to Colorado with my once boyfriend/love of my life, now roommate/pal/friend/what and live there? Maybe this really did require some tears and some sense and somebody help me. I was a tortured mess. Walked all over Boston from one end to the next in the heat of the summer, eating only grapes and Cheerios, taking the occasional psychedelic, and drinking wine. I cried from sun up to sundown and in between worked and walked and cried into the telephone, making teary phone calls at 5 am to anyone who would pick up. I missed appointments and sat in corner seats at the bar thinking I was invisible when I was really lovely and basically had no idea what on earth I was doing.
When I was in my thirties and living in New York, trying my hand at acting and doing stuff I always said I would, I fell hard for a boy who was 23. Ah, the 23 year old boy. He was stunning. Brand new and full of ideas and dreams. An old soul, so we had that, but young and 23. Gorgeous in the way that only a new adult can be. I couldn't bear to prevent him from the starts and stops and joys and pains of my twenties, couldn't even ask that he catch up to me, do what I wanted, be where I was, and it ended as I suppose it should have. Even now, I wonder how this boy grew into a man because there was so much there already...at 23.
When my sitter calls or texts each time to say she's sorry but she had to throw up, missed her train, lost her keys, just cannot pull it together, I swear that this is the absolute last straw. I need someone more reliable, someone who can commit, who cares about my schedule and my needs. I DO need that still. And sometimes I ask someone else to come or trade off my kids for someone else's another day. But when someone comes down with a case of the 23's, they need compassion and they need guidance and they need love. I give the business. I do. I say things like, "You don't want to represent yourself out there like that. You don't want to prove to be untrustworthy. Your word is your bond, you have to give it sincerely." I'm right. But I also remember being and feeling so brand new and believing that everything was just as urgent and important and earth-shattering as the first baby steps of a toddler. The world was opening up. I wanted to and believed I could do anything...if I could just get out of my own way.
When the girls get there, to 23, I hope I can breathe that rarefied air with them, recall when someone gave me a break and a nudge, let me go into the world and said they'd catch me, they'd be there, they'd let me figure it out, and give them the space to fuck up so beautifully. It is a fleeting moment, special and lovely, where you can get away with just about anything. Worn like leggings with short shirts, t-shirts with no bra, high heels with everything. It's for the young. And they look so good doing it, even if they drive you crazy and leave you hanging.
(c) Copyright 2015. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Recently, she has been cancelling our babysitting gigs at the last minute possible with lots of apologies and promises to do better and each time, rather than giving her the business. I gently explain to her how and why this is not acceptable, make other arrangements, and then check in on her a day or two later. I have talked her through break-ups, move outs, job searches, resume building, heartache, hospital stays, sending texts in the night when a thought comes into my mind. I want her to feel loved and cared for. She's 23. It's hard to know.
When I was 23, I found my poor soul at the end of one of the most important relationships of my life. While other bigger adults knew that this was par for the course, my imminent break up was consuming me, actually consuming me and I was achy and scrawny and scratchy and messy. I'd sent my belongings out to Colorado to move with him, where we'd live "as friends and roommates" because the shit was over and I had somehow agreed to that. I'd quit my job, the job procured with the help of one of my favorite people on earth, a college painting and drawing professor who really guided me in a way I'd not been in my life, and told everyone "So long, suckas!" And then backtracked. "What the f*** was I doing?" I had not thought this plan all the way through. I was going to MOVE to Colorado with my once boyfriend/love of my life, now roommate/pal/friend/what and live there? Maybe this really did require some tears and some sense and somebody help me. I was a tortured mess. Walked all over Boston from one end to the next in the heat of the summer, eating only grapes and Cheerios, taking the occasional psychedelic, and drinking wine. I cried from sun up to sundown and in between worked and walked and cried into the telephone, making teary phone calls at 5 am to anyone who would pick up. I missed appointments and sat in corner seats at the bar thinking I was invisible when I was really lovely and basically had no idea what on earth I was doing.
When I was in my thirties and living in New York, trying my hand at acting and doing stuff I always said I would, I fell hard for a boy who was 23. Ah, the 23 year old boy. He was stunning. Brand new and full of ideas and dreams. An old soul, so we had that, but young and 23. Gorgeous in the way that only a new adult can be. I couldn't bear to prevent him from the starts and stops and joys and pains of my twenties, couldn't even ask that he catch up to me, do what I wanted, be where I was, and it ended as I suppose it should have. Even now, I wonder how this boy grew into a man because there was so much there already...at 23.
When my sitter calls or texts each time to say she's sorry but she had to throw up, missed her train, lost her keys, just cannot pull it together, I swear that this is the absolute last straw. I need someone more reliable, someone who can commit, who cares about my schedule and my needs. I DO need that still. And sometimes I ask someone else to come or trade off my kids for someone else's another day. But when someone comes down with a case of the 23's, they need compassion and they need guidance and they need love. I give the business. I do. I say things like, "You don't want to represent yourself out there like that. You don't want to prove to be untrustworthy. Your word is your bond, you have to give it sincerely." I'm right. But I also remember being and feeling so brand new and believing that everything was just as urgent and important and earth-shattering as the first baby steps of a toddler. The world was opening up. I wanted to and believed I could do anything...if I could just get out of my own way.
When the girls get there, to 23, I hope I can breathe that rarefied air with them, recall when someone gave me a break and a nudge, let me go into the world and said they'd catch me, they'd be there, they'd let me figure it out, and give them the space to fuck up so beautifully. It is a fleeting moment, special and lovely, where you can get away with just about anything. Worn like leggings with short shirts, t-shirts with no bra, high heels with everything. It's for the young. And they look so good doing it, even if they drive you crazy and leave you hanging.
(c) Copyright 2015. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Thursday, June 18, 2015
Back to the Suburban Grind: Tip of the iceberg: An average life
Back to the Suburban Grind: Tip of the iceberg: An average life: This is how I feel right now. I am in 9th grade reading Huckleberry Finn with my class and each time they call Jim a nigger, I cringe. And...
Tip of the iceberg: An average life
This is how I feel right now. I am in 9th grade reading Huckleberry Finn with my class and each time they call Jim a nigger, I cringe. And it's said over and over. Many look at me sympathetically, shrug their shoulders, some even touch me on the arm if they are close enough because we all know, no matter how we all long for the adventure, that poor, ol' Jim and I have more in common than Huck and me. I don't deny that most feel uncomfortable with the language that is explained away with a "that's how people spoke of black folks at that time" but when we move on to "A Farewell to Arms" everyone else can drop their shame, their melancholy, longing for the expectation that I have forgiven this past and that "we've come a long way, baby" and get back to modern living.
But I see Jim and I know him because, though you may be looking at me and seeing an upper middle class, well-educated, articulate, funny, put together (at times) African-American (I prefer Black) woman with a handsome, French husband and two beautiful mixed kids, I come from a long line where Jim and folks like him are roots on my tree. I am, as the expression goes, the tip of the iceberg, but under the surface is a lineage of survivors and thrivers, former slaves and slavers. We are mixed by choice and very often not. I spent my early years and my summers on the front porch of my grandparents' home at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Though I lived in a white neighborhood in New Jersey and believed myself assimilated, I sat at the feet of my grands and great-grands and heard about racism firsthand. Not just being called "nigger" or "blackie" or "brown sugar" by white kids testing their power and position in the wide streets of the suburbs, but pervasive, oppressive, strangulating cruelty that only served to threaten and stunt the mental, emotional, spiritual, and social growth of black people. These were not stories or headlines. These tales were the lives of my family and my ancestors. No matter where I am in the world, this is the ground beneath me.
I did not grow up the way many envision black people growing up. Not because it is so rare but because you don't know us. And if you do, really do, then I am not talking to you, but I would venture to guess that you don't really. I dream of a life that is banal, no more exciting or charged than that of anyone else, maybe even the default. The life you think of when you think of every day life. And then I wake up and remember that I am black. That I am a black, sensitive, creative woman who, by nature of being black in America, cannot live an average life. That my life is meant to define, describe, explain, assuage, and calm the feelings of other citizens allowed to live their mundane lives while mine is fraught with symbolism and metaphor and hyperbole.
My grandmother told me often that she wanted better for me, for all of us, was grateful for what she'd seen us achieve in such a short amount of time, hoped that "white people were fair and good" to us. There was palpable fear and doubt, but also hope. I wanted to tell her, to show her that all her suffering and her efforts had not been in vain, that we were advancing. That the rapes, assaults, laws, white supremacy, and pervasive and accepted racism were seen as the horrors they were, were being put firmly in the past, and that WE were being seen for the "content of our character." And the advancement of our family specifically was tied to our advancement as black people in America collectively. Many black families will tell you the same. For us to be able to just be average, regular, unspectacular, under the radar, just living our lives gave her hope. It was the tip of the iceberg. She was sure we'd overcome. I carried that hope for her.
There were small things that reminded me we hadn't come as far as I'd hoped. My father getting followed home by the police on a morning run. People assuming he was a ball player because he drove a nice car. Having a very hard time finding an apartment even with full time employment, good credit, and a clean record. Having to consider that I had a clean record. Listening to people tell me, when hearing my experience as a black woman in America that racism wasn't the problem but poverty and elitism. Um, AND those too. Having to qualify that though, yes, micro-aggressions were not the same as being beaten or killed in the street, dealing with them was still incredibly damaging to the psyche. Having someone, a "friend" write something about "hey, blacks, I've suffered too and look at me" on my Facebook wall in response to more proof of the systemic racism that prevails in our country. Imagine trying to be part of a group or society or country but when the conch shell gets passed to you, everyone talks over you. Tells you it's not your turn.
If we meet you with rage, if we meet you with anger, you call us animals and beat us or pepper spray us or shoot us. If we ask for a fair shake, an opportunity, a chance, you say we are angling for special privilege. If we write stories or articles or blogs about our experiences on the outside, you say we, WE are the ones being divisive. If we tell you we are hurting, we are tired, we are traumatized by the rhetoric, by the hatred, by the violence, the unrelenting insensitivity and ignorance, you say buck up. When innocent black men, women, and children are murdered, people who look like us, in epic abuses of power, and no justice comes on their behalf. When we cry for them, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, cousins, friends, we are asked to consider why they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing. We are told that if they'd just listened, behaved, respected the law and the policies that were not designed with them in mind, they might have lived another day to face it all again.
This racist system is real and it's killing all of us. Not just Black people, but our country. It's not that we are a nation divided by black and white because that isn't true. It wasn't then and it isn't now. But racism, complacency, white privilege and its hideous cousin, white supremacy do threaten to tear us apart. And everything that anyone finds great about this nation will crumble into the seas like the icebergs of white and blue and purple crumbling under the heat of global warming. We are dying ever so slowly from a disease that feels impossible to stop. We are sure it is going to overtake us, consume us. It just might. Like people suffering from illness, we can resign or we can fight it with all we have. There is prayer, meditation, and there is love. And love...
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 1 Corinthians 13
I don't deny it, I am sinking, melting into the sea, afraid I will never be solid again. Each week, as I try to do what everyone else is doing, raising their children, trying to give them values and truths to uphold them, I am crying into the back of my hand, afraid to let them see what lies beneath the surface of their gleaming pyramid called life. I held the hope for my grandmother and now I hold it for my daughters. This conversation is just the start. It's the tip of the iceberg but if we don't tend to it, we are bound to hit the parts below the surface and dash all our dreams of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for an average life made special by our content, by our character, by our cooperation, and by our love.
RIP to the victims of the cowardly act of terrorism in at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
(c) Copyright 2015. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
But I see Jim and I know him because, though you may be looking at me and seeing an upper middle class, well-educated, articulate, funny, put together (at times) African-American (I prefer Black) woman with a handsome, French husband and two beautiful mixed kids, I come from a long line where Jim and folks like him are roots on my tree. I am, as the expression goes, the tip of the iceberg, but under the surface is a lineage of survivors and thrivers, former slaves and slavers. We are mixed by choice and very often not. I spent my early years and my summers on the front porch of my grandparents' home at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Though I lived in a white neighborhood in New Jersey and believed myself assimilated, I sat at the feet of my grands and great-grands and heard about racism firsthand. Not just being called "nigger" or "blackie" or "brown sugar" by white kids testing their power and position in the wide streets of the suburbs, but pervasive, oppressive, strangulating cruelty that only served to threaten and stunt the mental, emotional, spiritual, and social growth of black people. These were not stories or headlines. These tales were the lives of my family and my ancestors. No matter where I am in the world, this is the ground beneath me.
I did not grow up the way many envision black people growing up. Not because it is so rare but because you don't know us. And if you do, really do, then I am not talking to you, but I would venture to guess that you don't really. I dream of a life that is banal, no more exciting or charged than that of anyone else, maybe even the default. The life you think of when you think of every day life. And then I wake up and remember that I am black. That I am a black, sensitive, creative woman who, by nature of being black in America, cannot live an average life. That my life is meant to define, describe, explain, assuage, and calm the feelings of other citizens allowed to live their mundane lives while mine is fraught with symbolism and metaphor and hyperbole.
There were small things that reminded me we hadn't come as far as I'd hoped. My father getting followed home by the police on a morning run. People assuming he was a ball player because he drove a nice car. Having a very hard time finding an apartment even with full time employment, good credit, and a clean record. Having to consider that I had a clean record. Listening to people tell me, when hearing my experience as a black woman in America that racism wasn't the problem but poverty and elitism. Um, AND those too. Having to qualify that though, yes, micro-aggressions were not the same as being beaten or killed in the street, dealing with them was still incredibly damaging to the psyche. Having someone, a "friend" write something about "hey, blacks, I've suffered too and look at me" on my Facebook wall in response to more proof of the systemic racism that prevails in our country. Imagine trying to be part of a group or society or country but when the conch shell gets passed to you, everyone talks over you. Tells you it's not your turn.
If we meet you with rage, if we meet you with anger, you call us animals and beat us or pepper spray us or shoot us. If we ask for a fair shake, an opportunity, a chance, you say we are angling for special privilege. If we write stories or articles or blogs about our experiences on the outside, you say we, WE are the ones being divisive. If we tell you we are hurting, we are tired, we are traumatized by the rhetoric, by the hatred, by the violence, the unrelenting insensitivity and ignorance, you say buck up. When innocent black men, women, and children are murdered, people who look like us, in epic abuses of power, and no justice comes on their behalf. When we cry for them, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, cousins, friends, we are asked to consider why they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing. We are told that if they'd just listened, behaved, respected the law and the policies that were not designed with them in mind, they might have lived another day to face it all again.
This racist system is real and it's killing all of us. Not just Black people, but our country. It's not that we are a nation divided by black and white because that isn't true. It wasn't then and it isn't now. But racism, complacency, white privilege and its hideous cousin, white supremacy do threaten to tear us apart. And everything that anyone finds great about this nation will crumble into the seas like the icebergs of white and blue and purple crumbling under the heat of global warming. We are dying ever so slowly from a disease that feels impossible to stop. We are sure it is going to overtake us, consume us. It just might. Like people suffering from illness, we can resign or we can fight it with all we have. There is prayer, meditation, and there is love. And love...
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 1 Corinthians 13
I don't deny it, I am sinking, melting into the sea, afraid I will never be solid again. Each week, as I try to do what everyone else is doing, raising their children, trying to give them values and truths to uphold them, I am crying into the back of my hand, afraid to let them see what lies beneath the surface of their gleaming pyramid called life. I held the hope for my grandmother and now I hold it for my daughters. This conversation is just the start. It's the tip of the iceberg but if we don't tend to it, we are bound to hit the parts below the surface and dash all our dreams of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for an average life made special by our content, by our character, by our cooperation, and by our love.
RIP to the victims of the cowardly act of terrorism in at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
(c) Copyright 2015. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Back to the Suburban Grind: Color Me Bad
Back to the Suburban Grind: Color Me Bad: I don't know if the confusion is because my husband is French or because he is older than I am, but this whole birthday party planning t...
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